The BrakeBlog is running on the Energynet network now. My day off for MLK Jr. Day was a day for considering bandwidth issues related to my websites and moving them to Energynet. My first thought was to mark the current response times as measured through the Google Webmaster tools. Since one of the recurring problems I experienced with Godaddy was slow load times. It would be good information for me to know and it would make a good blog post later.

BrakeBlog Oct 2011 – Jan 2012 (Godaddy)

BrakeBlog

Page loadtime High 1086ms – Average 639ms – Low 360ms

Christian Heights UMC (ditto)

CHUMC

High 1730ms – Average 1080ms – Low 379ms

The church website loads 440ms slower on average when it is running normally. It will be interesting to see how these numbers change since the BrakeBlog has transitioned to its new home.

Another thing which is much more surprising to me personally is the radical difference in traffic patterns between my personal blog and the church website. The BrakeBlog received 143 (non-unique) visits in December while transferring 709 megabytes of data during the same period. These numbers are reversed on the church though. CHUMC received only 64 (non-unique) visits while transferring 1,810 megabytes in December. 28 megabytes per CHUMC user versus only 5 megabytes per BrakeBlog user. I have to think that the sermons I post online are far more popular than I realized.

Thanks to Paul Lloyd

Doing this analysis I realize how large both websites are. The church website seems to hit a ceiling at 100 users. I have been disappointed that I haven’t been able to attract more than that. A CHUMC user, however, is much more involved and that counts as much or more than the simple visitor total. After I move both websites away from Godaddy those TX/RX lights on the server won’t be blinking quite as fast as they were.

To all my visitors on the BrakeBlog and Christian Heights, THANK YOU! Stay tuned for the follow-up post when we find out what were the results of this experiment.

Energynet Datacenter

I have been a GoDaddy customer since 2003. For the vast majority of that time the service from GoDaddy was acceptable though not excellent. I tolerated many of GoDaddy issues because none justified the time necessary to switch. The most recent example happened in September 2011. The website for Christian Heights began loading very slowly and throwing “500 Internal Server” errors. When I emailed Support about this, their best response was to paraphrase; “It’s not our fault! WordPress is slow, you need to optimize your database.”

Our administrators actively monitor the performance of our hosting and balance the load on the servers as needed. However, as your site is hosted within a shared environment, you may experience periods of reduced performance. This can generally be caused by the application interfacing with the database or just to the amount of content the site contains. You can improve performance by optimizing the fields and tables of your database.

They are full of —— er, baloney. I know this primarily because the problem stopped immediately after I contacted them even though Support never admitted to doing anything. I have shopped for alternatives before but never bothered to make a serious move because Godaddy was always the cheapest among the mid-tier registrars. Being cheap always trumped whatever service problems I experienced.

It became a matter of principle when I read that Godaddy was supporting SOPA/PIPA. This time I am strongly motivated to leave Godaddy. I picked Hopkinsville Electric’s Energynet service to be my new web host. Energynet being local is very important. It is the primary reason why I am willing to pay more. I have taken the first step by transferring ericbrake.com to Hover. I expect to move christianheightsumc.org and ericbrake.ws also though not immediately. ericbrake.com will operate as a test site while I learn how to migrate both blogs to new installations of WordPress.